Media Coverage

Northwestern Memorial ranked best hospital in Illinois

It’s lucky No. 7 for Northwestern Memorial Hospital: For the seventh year in a row, the Chicago hospital has been named the best in the state by U.S. News & World Report.

Northwestern was also the only Illinois hospital to crack the top 20 in the country, settling into the No. 13 spot for the second year in a row, according to the rankings, which were released at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday.

New hepatitis C drugs mean diseased organs can be used for transplants

“I know there are some centers that think it’s the right thing to do” to offer hep C-infected organs, said lead author Josh Levitsky, a Northwestern University liver transplant specialist. “I just would encourage that it be done under research protocols so they can report the data.”

Device Warns Cancer Survivors of Sunburn

It could someday be a really important tool in the fight against skin cancer. Researchers at Northwestern University say they have created a device that could warn you when you’re getting sunburned.

Parents’ spirituality or religion tied to lower suicide risk in kids

The current results were not a surprise to Dr. John Walkup , a professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and chair of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Helping nature: Inducing labor avoids cesarean for some moms

Being induced doesn’t mean moms can’t have “natural childbirth” — they can forgo pain medicine or use a hospital’s homelike birthing center rather than delivering in “an operating room in a sterile suite with a big light over your head,” said the study leader, Dr. William Grobman, an OB-GYN specialist at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Treating Teen Depression Helps Parents’ Mental Health, Too: Study

Study co-author Kelsey R. Howard also noted that the new findings could be useful for healthcare providers, as they could consider assessing a parent’s level of depression when treating their child.” More young people today are reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness and suicidal thoughts,” said Howard. “At the same time, suicide rates have climbed in nearly all U.S. states. This research may help health care providers as we grapple as a nation with how to address these alarming trends.”

Treating Teen Depression Might Improve Mental Health Of Parents, Too

Those findings led another researcher, Kelsey Howard, to wonder whether the opposite is true — if kids get better, do the parents then feel better?

To answer her question, Howard, a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and her adviser, Mark Reinecke, analyzed data from a 2008 study that followed more than 300 teenagers getting treatment for depression over the course of about nine months — either through counseling, medication or both.

Treating Teens’ Depression May Be Great for Parents’ Mental Health, Too

Few studies, however, have looked at how a child might affect their parent’s own mental health. Kelsey Howard, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University and a co-author of the new research, says she suspects that’s because most of the research done so far has been concerned primarily with the treatment methods themselves, not on the effects of treatment on people’s relationships.

Inducing labor at 39 weeks leads to fewer C-sections, Northwestern study finds

“In the past, induction at 39 weeks in low-risk women hasn’t been offered — it’s actually been withheld, forbidden, and patients were actively dissuaded from it,’” said Dr. William Grobman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, a Northwestern Medicine physician and the study’s lead author. The study’s findings, which will be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, may prompt doctors and professional medical societies to dramatically change the way they advise pregnant mothers interested in inducing labor, Grobman said.